Seymour and ‘alt-right’ versus female MPs

Act MP David Seymour was stronly criticised – and supported – for comments he made about Green MP Golriz Ghahraman, in particular “she is a real menace to freedom”.

“I just think that Golriz Ghahraman is completely wrong, I don’t know if she understands what she’s saying, but she is a real menace to freedom in this country, whether or not she understands that she is, and I think that it’s important that all right-thinking New Zealanders say “the true danger ah… to any society is rulers who put in place rules and regulations saying you’re not allowed to express yourself” – that’s how tyranny begins.

And I’d just invite people to have a look at speeches that Xi Jing Ping gives and speeches that Golriz Ghahraman gives, and it’s actually very difficult to tell the difference. I actually looked at a couple of paragraphs – one paragraph from each – I tried to guess which was which – and ah… Xi Jing Ping actually looked like a more liberal ah guy on this issue than Golriz Ghahraman.”

It was claimed that this contributed to an escalation in online attacks against Ghahraman which led to Parliament providing increased security for Ghahraman after she got more death threats.

He referred to her as being a menace to society. I don’t think she is a menace to society. I think her views are not ones that I agree with, and I would agree with him on that. And I think that she is very illiberal when it comes to people’s freedom of speech but that bit does not mean to say that he needs to put it in such a personal way that he did, against her personally.

And my view is that parliament is a very tough place, but actually for some people it’s a lot tougher and she is someone who gives a lot of stuff back to people but she also, I think at the moment, is getting a lot more than what she deserves. And I just think it’s time we calmed down in parliament, and outside of parliament, and remembered that she is just a human being.

I have no problem with David doing what he does, except that if he does then he can expect me to make a comment about it.

So, actually, just like he wants to express his free speech, I am expressing mine, which is that we need to be a little bit kinder towards each other even when the other person has views entirely different from ourselves, and we don’t need to always make it so personal. That’s my feeling.

Seymour was unrepentant:

If people think that me saying that a politician who wants to expand the powers of the state to decide what you’re allowed to say and when they hear me say it, think that the way I say it is more important than the issue of freedom of speech then I think that person has their priorities wrong.

And I do think that a politician who wants to put stricter boundaries around what people are allowed to say, when they genuinely believe it, is a menace, not to our society, but to give me my proper quote, to freedom in our society. Because that is how tyranny begins and I think we should be a lot more worried about that, than how exactly it is said.

The counter claim has been that stoking up abuse and attacks against an MP, deliberately or not, is also a menace to society.

“Speaker Trevor Mallard is the latest to denounce my views and try to shut down any criticism of those who would take away our right to freedom of expression.

“Imagine if the state had even greater powers to punish speech at its disposal.

“The Government, emboldened by the Twitter mob, would now be using that power to investigate and punish a sitting MP’s genuinely-held views.

“Hate speech laws turn debate into a popularity contest where the winners get to silence views they don’t like by using the power of the state.

“We find ourselves in an astonishing situation: an MP can vigorously campaign to take away our right to freedom of expression, but, if another MP criticises them, Parliament’s Speaker says they are a bully.

“Freedom of expression is one of the most important values our society has. It cannot be abandoned because anyone, let alone Parliament’s Speaker, weighs in with accusations against anyone who defends it.

“ACT will continue to defend the critical principle that nobody should ever be punished by the power of the state on the basis of opinion.”

Calling out bullying speech is also free speech. As a number of female MPs have done:

A cross-party group representing women in Parliament has urged David Seymour to apologise for remarks he made about Green MP Golriz Ghahraman.

Signed by Labour MP Louisa Wall and National MP Jo Hayes – co-chairs of the Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians (CWP) New Zealand group – the letter asks that Seymour “reflect” on his “behaviour”.

“We ask that you reflect on your behaviour and consider offering a public apology to Golriz for the comments made, preferably in the House,” the letter addressed to Seymour reads.

The co-chairs said they’d received requests from members of the CWP group urging them to “take appropriate action” on their behalf in response to comments made by Seymour “in reference to a member of the House, Golriz Ghahraman”.

The letter acknowledged how Seymour didn’t make the comments in Parliament and couldn’t be held to account by Standing Orders – the rules of procedure for the House.

But it went on to tell Seymour: “We, as women MPs, consider your behaviour towards a colleague who has been under attack with death threats and is already in a vulnerable position is unacceptable”.

Again Seymour was unrepentant.

Seymour responded to the letter saying he was “disappointed” to receive it, and that the group “seem to believe that expressing a sincerely held view on an important topic makes me responsible for threats of violence”.

Seymour said the comments he made “do not come close to giving me such responsibility”, adding: “Your belief would absolve the real perpetrators, those making the threats, of responsibility.

“You also introduce a worrying implication that some MPs are unable to fully participate or be criticised because there are violent threats. You are effectively letting violent thugs set the agenda.”

No, they are trying to confront violent thugs from setting the agenda.

Seymour is getting into very risky territory here. He is appealing to the alt-right in social media but I think may be being fooled by how much voter support this might represent.

It has been reported that Act intends rebranding as a party this year. Seymour seems to be already attempting a rebranding.

But I think he would do well to consider the responsibilities of how an MP speaks in relation to free speech, especially when associated with hate speech.

For MPs, what they say can have consequences. They can give credence and support to abusive minorities. And they can also affect voter support. If Seymour lurches too far alt-right he risks becoming too toxic for National to make it easy for him in Epsom.

69 Comments

Corky

Not only is Green MP Golriz Ghahraman a menace to freedom…so is Louisa Wall.
The only thing stopping Seymour being proven right is these women lack the power to legislate their visions into reality. I would love to wave a magic wand and make these women leaders of a major political party. I’m sure our conversation would be very different to the one we are having now.

“You also introduce a worrying implication that some MPs are unable to fully participate or be criticised because there are violent threats. You are effectively letting violent thugs set the agenda.”

Enough said…apart from the fact that ..one act..one thug….has complete control over this country.

Kitty Catkin

What possible interest could they have in Charter Schools (as in financial interest, of course) ?

As GG was whining about being threatened long before he made these comments, it’s hard to see what effect he would have on those who supposedly make them. Louisa Wall et al are feeding an attention-seeker’s ego and also supporting the women as victims credo.They are distorting things out of all proportion, and giving him far too much power.

Duker

You said financial, I meant it as a political interest , its the sort of US fad that they would be interested in, certainly ACT had never mentioned it before the election ..you know when parties announce their future policies. Thats how ACT ended up with Hide , who was originally some sort of economic stooge for Alan Gibbs, taking his agenda and making a vaguely coherent policy, Im sure they ‘found’ Seymour as well ,and bought him out from whatever think tank he found himself in.

Kitty Catkin

I know Rodney Hide and David Seymour and have, I suspect, more inside information than you have. My husband was a board member and list candidate. At the time of the leadership change, we knew many things that were not in the press; he acted as a decoy for the press. Our phone rang nonstop – literally – we’d hang up and there’d be another one. The press tried to winkle information out of my husband but got nothing.

Don’t tell me about ACT.

Kitty Catkin

Duker

I said it was political interest, there is no money in charter schools anyway. Strange that you should think that.
I don’t know how Hide became leader but he became involved with ACT through his connections with Gibbs…I had thought Gibbs didn’t know anything about formal economics, I was wrong he was far smarter than Hide and had the qualifications to match, maybe he was already thinking about who to replace Prebble

Duker

No it isnt and never has been in the way you describe.
State Censorship of films and literature has existed for decades, is always there out of sight until very recently when it came into the public eye and was banned ( people will go to jail for distributing it)
Media organisations have exercised their privileges of not publishing stuff they dont like for what ever reason since for ever.
NZ only had a Bill of Rights as a project of Geoffrey Palmer , but it has a number of ‘exceptions’ like the Human Rights Act

The orginal white paper from 1985 meant it could have been a constitution level law
White Paper wanted –
-The Bill of Rights was to become entrenched law so that it could not be amended or repealed without a 75% majority vote in the House of Representatives or a simple majority in a public referendum;
-The Bill of Rights was to therefore have status as supreme law, thereby causing some erosion to the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty;
-The Treaty of Waitangi was to be wholly incorporated within the Bill of Rights thus elevating the Treaty’s status to that of supreme law;
-The Judiciary would have the power to invalidate any Act of Parliament, common law rule or official action which was contrary to the Bill of Rights.

And people think recent different proposals for policy have back tracked! This was the Mother of all backtracks

Duker

Pink David

Tom Hunter

No, they are trying to confront violent thugs from setting the agenda.

They’re working with the NZ Police and also lobbying Facebook and Twitter to identify and/or ban these thugs? They’re readying legislation to help do that?

No, they’re attacking a political party and politician whose ideas they’re all largely opposed to. How convenient.

Calling out bullying speech is also free speech. As a number of female MPs have done:

Yes it is and good on them. Let’s hope Seymour does not try and get into a contest for the Victim Stakes by complaining about all the abuse he’s receiving. I hate seeing that tactic rewarded but it seems normal now in the Age of Feelz.

Again Seymour was unrepentant.

Good on him. He’s learned the lesson from the likes of Trump, which is that these bullying mobs don’t want apologies or contrition; they want their opponents guilted and shamed into silence. I’ll guarantee that when Left-wing activists attack ACT or National politicians as being a “menace to society” (“racists”, “xenophobes”, “fascists”, etc) they’ll feel not the slightest guilt or shame in doing so – because they’re on the side of righteneous.

Muldoon was regularly called all these things by his Left opponents back in the day, and they genuinely felt it was entirely accurate. If he’d had social media, an overwhelming sense of victimhood (“I’m powerless”), and the tactical desire to weaponise it, he could have played the same game as Ghahraman.

If one were to predict between comity and authoritarianism in the coming years the odds would favor authoritarianism. Never has so much naked ambition disguised itself as virtue, and the more loudly political factions proclaim they’re out to save the world, the more ruthless they are likely to be. Liberty will come under assault from the banner of tolerance; fascism will advance in the guise of grievance.

Than

Put me down in the strongly supporting category. The word “menace” may have been poorly chosen, but the sentiment is 100% accurate. Golriz Ghahraman gives lip service to the notion of free speech, but at the end of the day her definition of hate speech will be “any political view I disagree with”. Seymour was completely right to call her out on it.

And the claim that Seymour’s comment is what led to the escalation in online attacks is, well, extremely tenuous. If not flat out laughable.

Kitty Catkin

Dear Golriz was quite happy to be seen smooging up to someone who incited genocide and then lying about the fact that she was on the defending side, not the prosecution. One doesn’t normally take selfies with someone whom one is prosecuting and if I was the accused and a very junior lawyer suggested it, I would not be posing with that person and grinning at the camera.

david in aus

The Left including Labour is being defined by Golriz. Mallard is doubling down. The media in NZ, like Australia, are out of touch with middle-class values. The Nats, if they are smart, should exploit this. The implications for Religous communities, as in the Folau case, are significant.

Tom Hunter

It has been reported that Act intends rebranding as a party this year. Seymour seems to be already attempting a rebranding.

Given the success of parties overseas which have kicked against the “common wisdom” as espoused by most academics, media figures and mainstream political parties, and given that ACT has got nowhere trying to push Rogernomics 2.0, this would not surprise me in the least. How many traditional ACT principles – say on free trade – that might mean trashing, is hard to say.

Whether that will work in NZ or not is hard to say. It is both our curse and our blessing that Kiwis tend to just trundle along, refusing to get too het up by activist screamers on any issue.

But given that both Labour and National seem more intent on appeasing the concerns and worries of relatively wealthy folks in our pretty suburbs, than on the working class areas of the likes of South Auckland and the provincial areas, given that Winston First appeals to many of those voters but likely will be gone after the 2020 election and will certainly vanish with his death or retirement, ACT might be able to get them and be re-born as a “country” party, rather like in Australia.

And of course this is without mentioning National’s very disturbing spinelessness when it comes to Communist China, as Michael Reddell has once again pointed out: National on international affairs

Patzcuaro

It appears to me that those that are claiming the “right of free speech” are predominantly from the most privileged group in society, ie European men. Those that are looking to temper the right, tend to come from less privileged groups in society that have faced discrimination and understand the effect of unfettered “free speech”. Is it “free” speech if someone else is paying a price for it?

Tom Hunter

And there it is, “fresh” from the academic world where it has bubbled away for at least three decades.

Since coming to NZ as a refugee – allowed into this country by all those nasty Old White Men who controlled our society back then (as they still do apparently) – Golriz Ghahraman attended Auckland Girls’ Grammar School, has both an LLB and BA, with a Masters from Oxford. She has served on numerous international legal tribunals and practiced law in NZ as a barrister, which put her in upper levels of the legal world. Now she is an MP, with a significant income, influence, and likely a Green list seat for as long as she wants.

At what stage do people like her drop the whole act of lacking power and privilege? At what stage in the rise to power and privilege do they stop pointing fingers at the strange forces that are still oppressing them?

The answer is never! The practice was established decades ago when the definition of racism was modified to include the word “power”: you can be the most vicious racist around but if you have no power then you’re not a racist. The same formulation is now applied to every “ist” and “ism”, combined with the paternal excuse that even if you are now powerful and privileged, your’re speaking on behalf of those who are not.

Clever. When Orwell wrote “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” he missed a far better one:

Patzcuaro

Kimbo

Er, no chap/chapess, you are shifting goal posts. Indeed you’ve confirmed the point that Golriz is now in a group that is, by any reasonable definition (i.e., one that is not determined by identity politics) “most privileged”.

David in aus

Kitty Catkin

Men can be legally forced to go to war. I was astonished to hear this being described as women not being allowed to go to fight in WWII. Men had no option.

Men can be forced to support children who are not theirs, even when DNA proves this. The law has always supposed that Mr Smith is the father of Mrs Smith’s children. George Eliot’s partner knew that his wife’s children were not his, but let his name go on the birth certificate…which meant that when the marriage broke up, he couldn’t divorce her because, in law, he had condoned her adultery !

Mr Bumble’s famous words ‘The law is a ass – a idiot’ (usually misquoted as ‘an ass. an idiot’) were in the context of his being told that because ‘the law suppose(d) that his wife act(ed) under his direction’, he will be charged as well for a crime committed by her.

Prostate cancer kills about the same number of men as breast cancer does of women, but has nothing like the funding (or didn’t; and I bet that it hasn’t now)

This person can also be a meth addict, and poor, and in prison, yet you have decided he is more privileged than, say, Salma Hayek, who is by any reasonable measure one of the most privileged people to have ever lived.

Maggy Wassilieff

I think the greens may have lured her. They certainly promoted her up the pecking order. May be one of their biggest misjudements (mistakes).

She sounded like she could be a good addition to the Green mix but she has been a negative influence so far.

However I don’t think any of her inadequacies as a politician are an excuse to harass her as much as is happening. On it’s own what Seymour said was minor, but in the context of everything else going on around her Seymour must have known what he said would encourage those obsessed with trying to destroy her political career.

She isn’t in a position of much influence so I think she should be ignored unless she can come up with some worthwhile iunput.

Tom Hunter

As various media outlets have refused to run an op ed from David Seymour defending himself, I have agreed to run it here.

Can’t wait to throw this one back at the next telemarketing phone call I get from the sad bastards at the NZ Herald begging me for a subscription.

It will also be interesting to see if the usual stock boilerplate abuse turns up: that RWNJ’s are just whinging snowflakes, etc, etc. After all, when you’re dealing with privileged pricks like Seymour, why should he be allowed to defend himself with OpEds: just another example of the sheer, arrogant cheek of the man and what he thinks his “rights” are! Let him buy an advertisement. He’s rich!

NOEL

slinkypress

How is saying someone is “a menace” hate speech. I am not “alt right” . I have been an Act (Party Vote and National (Electorate) vote for some time and see no reason to change (presently) if I change it will be because there is little to choose between National and labour and I will be looking for an electorate MP who better supports my views of self help, not state help.

Kitty Catkin

The offensive implication in the heading of this post that David Seymour and ACT are alt-right is scurrilous, slanderous and ignorant. It shows a woeful ignorance of the fact that people of all races are ACT members. The current president is, I think, Sri Lankan racially. He is dark brown, not white.

Alt-right implies white supremacism. To imply that anyone is that unless they are known to be shows that either the person doesn’t know what it means or is being deliberately offensive.

Alan Wilkinson

I can reassure the lady that whether she is Green, white or brown most people will have judged her daft, precious and dangerous to common sense based on her words and actions. If she fixes that problem most of her other problems will probably evaporate too.